Death, politics, and Vincent van Gogh: 2016 as seen through the lens of Wikipedia

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Anecdotally, 2016 was a year of transition and change in much of the western world. Some events could be described as tragedy, others as cause for celebration.

Regardless of how you feel about this year, Wikipedia editors were there to help you understand what happened in 2016 and then some. Here is 2016 as seen through the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia, both for the full year and by month.

As might be expected, politics features heavily—given the vote on ‘Brexit’, which seems likely to end in the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, and the United States’ presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Four of the top five most-edited articles related to the American election.

And the 11.5 million documents in the Panama Papers revealed global corruption on an unimagined scale.

“Wikipedia has become a place people turn to for breaking news,” Dan Gillmor, a news media expert and professor at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, told us last year.

Wikipedia editors do not appear to be immune to that phenomenon; they consume, edit, and expand upon the information available. When these events strike close to home, one editor suggested that editing can have a cathartic effect. René Pigier helped chronicle last year’s Paris terror attacks on the French Wikipedia. “Creating and copyediting those articles helped me to heal,” he said, “by doing some rational thinking and gathering potentially interesting information.”

We also found that Wikipedians’ drive to share free knowledge brought topics outside the time span of this year back to the forefront. Bailando 2015, an Argentinian dance show where dancers compete on live television, and the Beverly Gray mystery stories, published from 1934–55, were numbers ten and eleven on the year-long list (respectively).

Others reached back a bit farther into history. Four Wikipedia editors collaborated to rewrite the article on Vincent van Gogh, one of the most well-known painters in Western art, and brought it to ‘featured‘ status, a quality marker awarded only after an extensive peer review process by fellow Wikipedia editors.

The effort required to rewrite van Gogh’s article was “enormous,” Wikipedia editor Victoriaearle told us, due to the amount of research, reading, and writing required. This shows up in the number of edits made by the four, which put it at the twentieth-most-edited article in the entire year. But having the help of others made it easier, fellow editor Ceoil said, as working “with others is always the most satisfying way to work through an article.” On their motivation for taking on such a task, Modernist told us:

“

[van Gogh was] historically one of the most intense, psychologically coherent, intuitive, emotional, expressive, and aesthetic visual communicators in the history of western painting. An artist misunderstood for decades, constantly being misinterpreted, re-interpreted, studied, re-studied, yet seemingly always escaping a clear understanding of his true nature. Van Gogh is both compelling and somewhat mysterious, and yet he is considered universally to be a great artist; certainly worth studying, reading about and writing about as well.

”

More surprise contenders from centuries ago were two articles related to early Irish Christianity, which took several spots on the most edited list by month. Archdeacon of Kells was the seventh-most-edited article in September, and Manchán of Mohill, a Christian saint in Ireland nearly five hundred years ago, pops up at number eight in October and November.

Read on for the lists of most edited articles, for the year and by month.

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